NR 305 Rapid Assessment of a Client Discussion
NR 305 Rapid Assessment of a Client Discussion
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Please choose one of the patient scenarios below. Next, complete a rapid assessment, and provide a SBAR report to a classmate. Remember to include all concepts of patient safety, standard precautions, and professional standards.
- You are covering for a coworker who is off the floor for lunch, when you suddenly hear a loud crash coming from a nearby patient room. You quickly run in and discover Mr. Johnson who was admitted yesterday with a diagnosis of cerebral vascular accident (CVA) unconscious on the floor between the bed and the bathroom.
- You are called to the room of 2-year-old Jonah by his mother who states the child has suddenly started breathing very loudly and does not look right. Upon entering the room you quickly recognize that the child is in respiratory distress as his lips are cyanotic and the use of accessory muscles is evident.
- You are in the process of admitting Ashley, a 27 year old who is 28 weeks pregnant with her first child, to the obstetric unit for complaints of headache, dizziness, and swelling of her lower extremities when she suddenly begins seizing.
- n the current era of managed care, direct
contact time with clients is often severely
constrained, and practitioners face a
difficult task in dividing the minutes
available among such varied tasks as
problem identification, relationship
development, intervention, and guiding
the client toward termination. In addition,
as funding sources’ requirements for
accountability and quality control increase, practitioners must also complete
initial assessments, monitor progress on an
ongoing basis, and evaluate outcomes.
Managed care methods often seem paradoxical for mental health professionals, in
that they limit client contact time—and
thus measurement time—while mandating
greater accountability that can be accomplished only through improved measurement. Not surprisingly, considerable
demand has arisen for reliable and valid
measures that can help meet accountability
requirements, while maintaining a good fit
with the professional training, treatment
orientation, and time constraints of
practitioners.Fortunately, the number and range of
standardized assessment scales available
for use in practice and research have
expanded rapidly in the past 10 to 15
years. Brief measures, sometimes referred
to as rapid assessment instruments or
RAIs, are a particularly fast-growing
subset. RAIs are distinguished from other
measures by their variety, ease of use,
cross-disciplinary applicability, low cost,
and, above all, brevity. Most include fewer
than 50 items, some have fewer than 10,
and all can be completed by most clients in
a relatively brief time—often as little as
one to five minutes. This allows standardized measurement to be a brief part rather
than a principal component of client
contacts.
Unfortunately, many professionals are
unaware of these instruments or their
breadth and diversity. Others know about
RAIs, but employ them only sparingly due
to lack of information about the types of
measures available; how to identify and
select them; how to determine which are
considered best; how to obtain the RAIs
they wish to try; or because they believe,
often incorrectly, that the measures can
only be applied by licensed psychologists
specializing in psychometric testing. Our
goal is to provide an overview of RAIs,
how they can be used, how they can be
located and evaluated, and how to make
them a tool for enhancing practice rather
than simply another layer of paperwork.
Types of RAIs
We define RAIs as empirically tested
measures with known psychometric